My final (and very long overdue!) Dress Your Best Week outfit did double duty, for it served to emphasize both my curly hair and my tiny feet.

I’ll start with my feet, because they are the uncomplicated part of this outfit. My feet essentially stopped growing when I was twelve years old. They have been size 7 ever since, with some occasionally fluctuation between 5 1/2 (at a bowling alley) and 7 1/2 (if I’m desperate). Although 7 sounds like a pretty common, not-too-small size, somehow my feet look tiny, like they belong to a small child!

Some shoes in particular, such as my black Toms, really emphasize the small size of my feet. No matter how many times she’s seen my feet, my mom is still prone to squealing, “Your feet are so TINY!” nearly every time I see her. There is very little about me that is delicate—I tend to stomp around my apartment rather than walk, and I’m clumsy to the point of not being trusted around a hot oven—but my feet are small and sweet and feminine, and that is why I love them.

The last part about my feet that makes me love them? They are just so damn cute! Maybe it’s because I wore flip flops probably 300 days out of the year while in high school in San Diego, but I always make sure to take good care of my nails and moisturize my toes. Whether they’re tiny in shoes or polished in sandals, my feet remain one of my favorite body parts!

The last part of my body that I decided to emphasize during Dress Your Best Week is also the most complicated: my hair.

Until I hit puberty in sixth grade, my hair was long and straight with the occasional wave. Then, all of a sudden, my hair became curly, and I had no idea what to do with it. I got a dreaded triangle haircut just before sixth grade graduation, blow dried the hell out of it before special occasions, and avoided washing it because it looked better (read: less poofy) with a day’s worth of oil on the strands. In my high school Leadership class, I was once even awarded “Worst Hair”! I tried gel after mousse after spray after creme, never buying the same product twice because nothing seemed to work well enough. It wasn’t until I got to college that I started figuring out how to do my hair.

Today, I am the happiest I have ever been with my hair. It looks healthier and curlier and happier than it has ever looked before, and I owe this to the products and routines I’ve learned from reading websites like Naturally Curly, a community for curly-haired gals like me!

So, that wraps up Dress Your Best Week. Hope you enjoyed reading all the posts on academichic and elsewhere, and hope you enjoyed my posts too! (I was pretty excited to see one of my outfits highlighted in academichic’s roundup of its reader’s outfits—thanks to Lindsay for the photo!) Now, back to our regularly scheduled programing: random shit I found on the internet! Cheers!

For more, check out academichic‘s original post on Dress Your Best Week.

My third outfit for Dress Your Best Week, worn on Thursday, was one of my favorite “grown up” (read: non-thrift store) dresses, a yellow J. Crew wrap dress to emphasize my bust. In my previous post I mentioned how my narrow waist gives me an hourglass figure that I love to emphasize, and I would be remiss to not acknowledge the role my bust plays in creating that silhouette.

I am lucky to have always been the bearer of a bust line that makes me happy. Ever since my bust was anything I had to think about (since middle school, that is) I have felt proportional and confident about the way I looked. I like the way I fill out v-necks and bikini tops, yet I can still go braless comfortably when I wear halter or backless tops—or, on days like today, when I’m just lazing around the house!

You may be thinking that this dress is somewhat demure for an outfit intended to emphasize my bust, but I had to balance bustiness with a work-appropriate outfit, and this yellow dress—with its empire waist-line sash and v-neck wrap top—fit the bill perfectly!

For more, check out academichic‘s original post on Dress Your Best Week.

Day 2 of Dress Your Best Week (Wednesday’s outfit) served to highlight my waist. I am lucky enough to have something of an hourglass figure, with a narrow, well-defined waist that I never really appreciated until high-waisted skirts and waist-belted dresses came into fashion. What a shame that it went to waste (heh) for all those years during the rein of low-rise jeans and skirts worn around the hips!

Once I embraced waist-emphasizing dresses and skirts, I never looked back. My waist is the reason that my style has evolved to favor outfits with a 40s or 50s silhouette.

The real workhorse in this outfit is the brown woven belt, which is probably the best thrift store purchase I have ever made. Before waist-emphasizing styles gained widespread popularity, I found thrift stores were the best place to find belts that were short enough to be worn around the waist, since department and mall stores were still selling mostly hip-length belts. This brown belt is my go-to waist emphasizer, and helps make this green Gap skirt—which I purchased years ago to be worn around the hips—into the perfect waist-emphasizing outfit. Usually I like to wear a bright eye-catching necklace with this simply black blouse, but since this outfit was all about the waist, I left my neck clear so that all emphasis would be on the belt and the narrowness of my waist.

So here’s to you, waist, for giving me an hourglass figure that I absolutely love, and for helping me feel beautiful and feminine in dresses and skirts!

For more, check out academichic‘s original post on Dress Your Best Week.

For my first outfit of Dress Your Best Week (which I actually wore last Tuesday—apologies for the slow posting!) I decided to highlight my eyes. My bright blue eyes are undoubtedly the feature of my appearance that prompts the most comments from other people, and the feature that most defines my face. I love how light and bright they are, and how unusual they look next to my dark brown hair.

This is not particularly uncommon, but my eyes also change color depending on what I wear, and the color that most affects how they look is, unsurprisingly, blue. When I wear a blue shirt or a blue dress, my eyes become even deeper and brighter blue than usual. One day in high school I was wearing a mineral blue sweater when a friend looked at my eyes and told me, “That. That color. Your entire wardrobe should be that exact color.”

While the button down shirt I wore to work on Tuesday is a different shade of blue that that sweater, I still think it makes my eyes brighten and glow. It is hard to see in this photo, but I’m also wearing dangling earrings with a light blue stone; I like to think the stone mimics the color and size of my eyes, thus furthering the shirt’s effect.

I wish I could also applaud my eyes for their functionality, but I’ve worn glasses and contacts since I was eight, and my vision is now so poor that I can’t see the giant ‘E’ at the top of the eye chart. As such, this post will have to remain a love letter to a superficial quality, but one that I can’t imagine myself without.

For more, check out academichic‘s original post on Dress Your Best Week.

One of my favorite style blogs academichic (which I’ve posted about before) has declared this week Dress Your Best Week, and I am so on board! During this week’s posts, the blog’s three authors will dress to highlight their favorite features and body parts, rather than to downplay disliked features, as is the emphasis of nearly all the fashion advice we read in magazines, hear on TV and from our girlfriends, and even think in our heads as we get dressed in the mornings. In reference to last year’s inaugural Dress Your Best Week, The Chics said something awesome:

All three of us were surprised by how empowering such a simple mental switch could be.

Preach! This blog is typically bereft of personal posts and/or photos of me, but I’m going to make an exception for this awesome idea, and participate! To begin my contribution to Dress Your Best Week 2010, here is the list of my 5 favorite body parts, to be highlighted in this week’s outfits: